Why Collaboration and Innovation Are Key to Improving Medical Research

Behind any landmark cure is years of medical research. But the old goal of research — to find a one-size-fits-all treatment for a disease, based on a set of standard protocols — must radically change to further and diversify advances in the field, experts argued at the TIME 100 Health Summit on Thursday. Sean Parker, an entrepreneur and founder of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, came to the complex world of biotech, life sciences and health care research as an outsider. (Parker co-founded Napster and was the first president of Facebook.) “It seemed like there was tremendous opportunity. The field looked and felt a lot like the early Internet,” he explained at the summit. “There was a lot of similarity in terms of enthusiasm and excitement and breakthroughs… and yet there were these inherent systemic obstacles that felt like they were slowing down progress,” Parker said. The cost of enrolling a patient in a clinical trial, for instance, can be “extraordinarily high,” and researchers focused on similar treatment goals often work separately from one another — without sharing data. The Parker Institute’s goal is to connect cancer doctors, share information among researchers and accelerate new treatments. Work at the Parker Institute has led to the first approved gene immunotherapy for blood cancers and Nobel Prize-winning immune-based cancer drugs. “We’re all in it, at the end of the da...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized HealthSummit19 Research Source Type: news